The beginner’s guide to Twitter Ad Framework

You might have received some emails from Twitter over the last few months sharing the latest changes they are making to help advertisers accomplish their marketing objectives. Frankly, I just receive too many emails from Twitter, and I’ve lost count of how many times I simply marked them as read.

But one particular promotional email grabbed my attention

Have you seen this?

It should like familiar to Facebook advertisers-

Like Facebook, Twitter has streamlined its ad offerings to help advertisers create campaigns that better match their marketing goals. Let’s take a closer look and see if they pale in comparison to Facebook’s comprehensive ad framework.

This feature enables advertisers to reach users based on the keywords in their recent tweets and the Tweets with which users recently engaged.

In other words, you can reach Twitter users who used a certain keyword recently, and the recency of use is the important key you have to unlock the door to reach your target audience. Companies that can react in realtime (or at least as recent as Twitter considers) will stand to benefit from Twitter’s keyword-targeting ability.

2. Finding more leads on Twitter

The idea of finding more leads will surely attract more advertisers. And the primary Twitter tool that will help advertisers accomplish this is the Twitter Lead Generation card, which I covered in this article last week.

On top of the available targeting options listed above, advertisers can also choose to target users by device, a targeting option that has seen much success with advertisers on Facebook. Like Facebook’s device targeting option, Twitter also goes beyond offering you the choice of targeting by desktop or mobile to include specific mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS, and it also goes deeper to include specific versions of the operating systems.

Uses of such specific targeting options are limited, but they can be valuable to app developers who seeking to reach those using specific versions of operating systems that are compatible with their apps.

Here’s a summary of the targeting options you’ll find as you’re trying to find more leads on Twitter:

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Interests

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Keywords

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Device

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Geography & Language

The lead generation objective is not found within Facebook’s ad objective framework. In a way, Twitter makes it easier to plan and execute a campaign to generate leads through driving users to sign up with their email address. To do so on Facebook, you’ll need to use an app and promote it.

The overall result appears to be the same but the mechanism is different. In my opinion, I’d prefer Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards as they reduce a step required in attracting a signup, making it easier for users to do so.

3. Increasing clicks and/or conversions

The ad framework for increasing clicks and conversions on Twitter is similar to that of finding more leads.

To take advantage of this ad objective, you’ll need to set up and use the Website Card. The website card is an ad unit similar to the Lead Generation Card both in functionality and looks.

And these are the targeting options available for this ad objective:

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Interests

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Keywords

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Device

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Tailored Audiences

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Geography and Language

Tailored Audiences

Tailored Audiences, is their response to Facebook’s Custom Audiences. It’s their latest weapon, an the most important feature I want to bring to your attention.

Twitter enabled advertisers to reach users who have visited their website in the first public announcement of Tailored Audiences. Since then, they’ve beefed up its ability to include email addresses uploaded from your CRM database. Twitter IDs (think scraped Facebook UIDs), exploit the ability to exclude specific custom audience and lookalike audiences.

In short, it looks spookily similar to Facebook’s Custom Audience:

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Website visitors VS Website custom audience

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CRM database & Twitter IDs VS Data file & Mailchimp custom audience

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Look-alike-only targeting VS Lookalike audience

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Exclusion targeting VS Excluded audiences on Power Editor

4. Tweet Engagements

Twitter allows you to target users based on the following options:

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Interests

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Keywords

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Device

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Geography and Language

I won’t dwell on this too much as it is a basic ad unit that requires little explanation. But, here’s one word of advice: Don’t focus too much on the raw number of engagements, instead focus on how much of those engagements are leading to something more meaningful – like a personal email thread that addresses deeper concerns the customer may have.

5. App Installs

Reagarding app install ads, Twitter allows you to accomplish these two things:

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Reach potential users

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Reach existing users to update their version of your app

To make use of this ad, you will need to use an App Card, which is similar to the Lead Generation and Website Cards that we discussed earlier.

The targeting options available for this ad objective seem quite limited compared to what we have discussed earlier:

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Device

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Interests

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Keywords

Your turn

We’ve covered all the ad objectives that Twitter can help you accomplish – are you ready to hop onto the bandwagon or would you stay away from it? Would you consider Twitter as a marketing platform now that Facebook reach is declining and Twitter is making massive improvements to their ad offerings? Let us know!

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